'Everything Is Energy': How Time Lords See the World

Steven Melendez

Image: Shutterstock

In the early afternoon of the first Sunday of this month, in a slightly stuffy conference room at New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania, Sean David Morton casually mentioned that he can travel through time.

Morton, a radio host with a shock of mussy brown hair and youthful face that match his contagious energy, said he learned the practice from Buddhist monks while studying at a monastery near Mount Everest in Nepal.

“They are, for all intents and purposes, time lords,” Morton later told me. “They travel the time stream.”

Based on their training, Morton said he was able to travel about 100 years into the future, where he learned that the current wars in the Middle East would weaken the American economy and lead to internal struggles, along with a devastating war with China.

“China’s a smoking hole in the ground,” Morton told the audience at the New Life Expo. Canada and the United States would be combined into a North American Union under the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.

But the survivors of the war and their descendants would experience a spiritual reawakening. From his vantage point in New Omaha, Nebraska, Morton said he saw future citizens dressed in white gowns of a material called “electrosilk,” which amplified their psychic powers. Computers were based around crystal balls and streaming fountains of water, Morton said, and, he later told me, humans were guided by “a female messianic figure called the Emmanuella."

Perhaps most remarkable, though, was that Morton, who spoke several times throughout the three-day conference, only came to mention his travels through time toward the end of an hour-long talk on the last day of the event. Morton had, he said, managed a feat speculated about by every major science fiction writer of the past century, yet he seemed to throw out the story as casually as another radio host might reminisce about seeing Aerosmith before they made it big.

When I asked Morton later why he didn’t make a bigger deal out of the experience, he seemed almost confused by the question, and essentially said that time travel’s really no big deal.

“It's very easy to travel in time when you remote view," he said, explaining he once led a pre-2001 class in viewing New York City, circa 2015. Nobody saw the World Trade Center; everyone saw “massive flooding,” he said.

"There's two universal mantras—one is 'I could be wrong,' and one is 'A-ha.'"

Morton was one of many speakers at the Expo who confidently and nonchalantly presented an intricate, fascinating and entirely unorthodox view of how the world works. Yet for all their conviction, the speakers seemed more willing to accept each other’s views than many outsiders would be.

"You have to respect that you are opening up your minds to all possibilities," said Mark Becker, who’s been organizing the New Life Expo since 1990 and publishing a related magazine since 1981. "There's two universal mantras—one is 'I could be wrong,' and one is 'A-ha.'"

Becker, who still sports hair almost as long as on the cover of his 70s exercise record Basic Yoga and You, opened Manhattan’s Serenity Natural Healing Center in the 1970s, offering yoga instruction and natural food before they were mainstream, he said.

“Even if you are not a devotee of the lotus position, you might be fascinated with the hundreds of herbs, barks and seeds displayed in the shop on the street side of Serenity’s brownstone,” said a 1977 review in The New York Times.

A 1984 “Talk of the Town” piece in The New Yorker reported that Becker had taught luminaries like writer Erica Jong and actress Carol Lynley and explained that his “Yogaerobics” classes, combining traditional yoga with a cardio workout, drew some skepticism from more conservative practitioners.

Becker said he wanted to make yoga accessible to everyone, including members of religious faiths that at the time might have been skeptical of the practice.

“I want to open a center without orange robes, where Catholics and Jews can go, without their priests and rabbis saying, ‘what are you doing?’” he told me of his thoughts around the time he opened Serenity.

Traditionally, Becker told me, yogis have taught that headstands and shoulder stands provide a literal new perspective on the world.

"While we're in that, we see the world upside down, and we see the world as another person would see it, and that's again when you get the ‘A-ha’ and the ‘I could be wrong,’" he said.

There’s a comparable effect from the sharing of ideas that takes place at the New Life Expo, which is now held three times a year in New York City, he said.

Alongside her on the panel were Stephen Popiotek, who performs guided meditations and also channels extraterrestrial beings; Marge Ptaszek, a student of the “Book of Knowledge”, which adherents believe comes from the same plane as the Bible and Koran; well-known New York astrologer Diana Brownstone; and Thunder Cloud, a researcher who said he’s developed various holographic images that can do everything from reduce the power consumption of cell phones when used as digital wallpaper to change the flavors of drinks when used in coasters.

“It's all the same thing—it's energy,” Audrey Light Language told me, when I asked about the respect she and the other panelists accorded each other’s beliefs. “Some people don't want to express it in a religious way or a spiritual way: it's a quantum field, so you present it that way, it’s all the same thing."

For her part, she said she began communicating with spiritual beings after studying books on esoteric subjects from the local library. On library trips with her children, she’d pick up books on spirituality and life after death, quantum physics, and ancient architecture, while her friends preferred reading more popular literature, she told me.

"I had no one to speak to about these interests," she said, until the beings began to communicate with and through her, orally and through automatic writing, where her hands move beyond her control.

“You’re an ancient diviner,” she said the beings told her, a priestess of Isis in a past life. “And I’m thinking, ‘what?’”

But she came to learn to speak to what she’s come to refer to as “beings of light,” she said.

"The beings of light that came through are separate from when at the end [of the panel session] I spoke the Light Language," she said. "Their name is not translatable, because there is no English word for it."

"The black helicopters started at that point, too," he said in one presentation, saying that less benevolent beings are working with the “shadow elite” to dominate the globe and slow the evolution of human consciousness.

Popiotek, the other spiritual channeler on the panel, seemed to have a similar experience, saying he began to communicate with extraterrestrial beings in his teens and early 20s.

"The black helicopters started at that point, too," he said in one presentation, saying that less benevolent beings are working with the “shadow elite” to dominate the globe and slow the evolution of human consciousness.

“A lot of the heavy metals that they’re spraying in the chemtrails are to slow down the new DNA strands,” he said, referring to chemicals alleged by some to be sprayed in the wake of high-flying planes. "We're like bugs being sprayed on by this shadow elite."

Popiotek said he’s had some success communicating with elemental spirits embodied in bismuth, aluminum and other metals in the chemtrails.

“You can communicate to these elemental spirits the same way you would reach out to your guides or angels," and they’re not happy at being used the way they are, he said.

Like Morton, Popiotek sees an upcoming era of conflict and heightened psychic energy. Popiotek told me he got his information from “a shamanic perspective and a channeling perspective,” while Morton’s predictions are based on Mayan scripture and his time travel experiences.

“It’s kind of like left and right brains communicating,” Popiotek said, when both methods lead to the same result.

He generally uses intuitive methods to try to verify what others claim about the future, and about the world, he said.

"It's almost like a vibration a truth has,” he said. "There is a differential between that and what lies or an illusion has."

One speaker at the Expo, Qi Feilong, introduced as a kung fu master and onetime Shaolin monk, recently appeared on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, where he stopped the second hand of a clock without touching it, karate chopped through chopsticks with a $20 bill, and took repeated kicks to the crotch from host Nick Cannon without apparent pain.

Sometimes, through “dream programming” techniques, he can get the answers while he sleeps, and sometimes, he can check the facts through the beings he channels.

"If there are things I question, I usually ask to get confirmation over a period of time," he said. "I ask my guide or angels."

Becker, too, said he often evaluates others’ claims intuitively and spiritually.

One speaker at the Expo, Qi Feilong, introduced as a kung fu master and onetime Shaolin monk, recently appeared on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, where he stopped the second hand of a clock without touching it, karate chopped through chopsticks with a $20 bill, and took repeated kicks to the crotch from host Nick Cannon without apparent pain.

On the first evening of the Expo, he repeated the chopstick demonstration, and invited an audience member to kick him in the groin, though she respectfully declined. In other demonstrations, Qi’s set newspapers on fire from across the room, while they’re in the hands of audience members.

While similar effects can be demonstrated through stage magic—a clock’s hand can be held in place by a concealed magnet, chopsticks furtively struck with part of the hand in addition to the cash, a newspaper ignited through a hidden chemical reaction—Qi attributes his accomplishments to his own spiritual energy.

“I know he’s real,” said Becker. “It just shows how everything is energy."

And certainly, some of the claims made at the New Life Expo are subject to empirical verification.

“You simply send a text to your phone, and hold it next to a glass of water, and drink, and you get the same benefit as if you took a pill,” Thunder Cloud, the quantum physicist whose long blond hair drew “rock star” jokes from the other panelists, told me of one of his holographic inventions.

And, slightly more abstractly, astrologer Diana Brownstone emphasized her predictions are based on interpreting the positions of the stars and planets.

"It's all mathematical,” she said. “It's all plotted out astronomically, where the planets are going to be."

The interpretation of those plots, and the informal counseling Brownstone provides, is where the art comes in.

"I always try to give them how many different variables, how it can play out,” she said.

And, skeptics have long argued, those ambiguities make it difficult to actually test the accuracy of an astrologer’s or psychic’s predictions.

Many astrologers predicted that Mitt Romney would be happy with the results of the 2012 presidential election, Morton said during the panel, arguing they weren’t necessarily wrong.

“It turns out losing made him more happy than being president of the United States," he said.